Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39434 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
According to writer and editor Block (Our Bodies, Ourselves), "the United States has the most intense and widespread medical management of birth" in the world, and yet "ranks near the bottom among industrialized countries in maternal and infant mortality." Block shows how, in transforming childbirth into a business, hospitals have turned "procedures and devices developed for the treatment of abnormality" into routine practice, performed for no reason than "speeding up and ordering an unpredictable...process"; for instance, the U.S. cesarean section rate tripled in the 1970s, and has doubled since then. Block looks into a growing contingent of parents-to-be exploring alternatives to the hospital-and the attendant likelihood of medical intervention-by seeking out birthing centers and options for home-birth. Unfortunately, obstacles to these alternatives remain considerable-laws across the U.S. criminalizing or severely restricting the practice of midwifery have led the trained care providers to practice underground in many states-while tort reform has done next to nothing to lower malpractice insurance rates or improve hospital birthing policies. This provocative, highly readable expose raises questions of great consequence for anyone planning to have a baby in U.S., as well as those interested or involved in women's health care.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Library Journal, 5/15/07
"A stirring discussion of reproductive rights, informed consent, and the rights of the mother vs. the fetus... Recommended."

Review
Parents Express
“Presents a full picture of maternity care in America.”

Mothering
“Not only a must-read for any woman planning to have a baby in the near future, but also for anyone who cares about how the healthcare industry’s interface with politics affects the quality of our lives here in the U.S….Impeccably researched…Moving and full of gritty details…Read[s] like a can’t-put-it-down novel.”

Customer Reviews

Eye opening, interesting and a must read for ALL women!
Pushed was very informative and gave you SO much information about maternity care then and now. It also gave insight as to how to prep myself and how to be an informed consumer as to the type of maternity care that I would like to have. This book encourages women to take back birth and be informed instead of blindly trusting it to "the experts". I would HIGHLY recommend anyone who is considering going into the OB/GYN field and to any women who can get pregnant. This is fantastic! Once I started I couldn't put it down!

Another c-section casualty
I had a completely complication-free pregnancy and planned on a natural birth. Like so many of the women detailed in this book, I ended up with a c-section because of fears of macrosomia (big baby). At my 40 week appointment, when I had not yet started dilating, the OB decided the baby was getting too big and I needed a c-section. When I protested, be brought in two colleagues and the three of them went through every possible complication for vaginal delivery of a large baby: shoulder dystosia, cerebral palsy, even stillbirth (yes, they sat there and told me if I didn't get a c-section it wouldn't be there fault if I had a stillbirth). I felt completely bullied and powerless and had the c-section. My daughter was a health 9 lb 12 oz, but I had terrible problems recovery from surgery, awful breastfeeding problems (my milk took over a week to come in), and postpartum depression that made bonding with my baby and, well, everything in life, difficulty. I still believe I could have had a vaginal birth. And now I'll likely never be able to have a VBAC, since so few hospitals and doctors allow them, unless I go the home birth route. This book showed me I was not alone. And while I don't have conclusive statistics, I can say that among my two sisters-in-law and three friends who were pregnant when I was, all six of us -- yes, all six -- had c-sections either for macrosomia or "failure to progress." And these were all healthy, normal pregnancies. Truly scary.

Never mind "What to Expect"--read this first
Sixteen years after my own "failure to progress" emergency C-section, Jennifer Block brought it all back in minutes. Intervention leading to intervention was the story of my first son's birth. My second positive pregnancy test jumped straight from joy into abject fear. Fear is a good motivator sometimes--our last two were born at home with two certified (and illegal at the time) midwives. Their beginnings aren't muddled in with my own trauma. The sad fact is, it's all thought of as so "normal" that most women today don't know what they've lost.

This book should be mandatory reading-- I agree with the previous reviewer--America needs a revolution in it's birth practices. I plan on helping start it by giving this book to every woman I know thinking about becoming pregnant. Thanks to Jennifer for all the hours spent researching this material. It is sorely needed.